Revenge of the Turkeys

“What’s up with that rabbit? It’s not even scared of us!” my fiancé Lizzy said. Of course, looking back, the fearless bunny should have been our first warning sign. I mean, there it was, on the grass next to the parking lot of the Elizabeth A. Morton Wildlife Refuge, in Sag Harbor, New York, and we’d walked right by it, and the thing hadn’t even glanced our direction. The rabbit just sat there, a foot or two away, all innocent and furry and friendly-like, munching on clover and paying us no mind. Assuming all the animals in the area would be equally genial, we continued down the path in good humor.

Not long after the bunny sighting, we rounded a bend and saw that the way before us was blocked by a pack of wild turkeys. “Wow, look at all those turkeys,” I said. There were seven or eight of them, milling about and pecking at the ground, ruffling their feathers and making cute little gobble noises. We paused, a little uncertain how we should proceed. In the spirit of things, Lizzy thought it wise to make a sound like a chicken at them, kind of a friendly “bruck-bruck-bruuuck!!!” Seven or eight long red necks rose up at once, and the turkeys turned and looked at us. And then—I swear they resembled nothing so much as velociraptors—the turkeys began to jog at us, their gait languid yet swift, casual yet relentless. In response, Lizzy and I did the only reasonable thing that one can do when accosted by a gang of twenty-pound birds: we ran away.

***

If we are what we eat, then as Americans, we are turkeys. Turkey was eaten at the first Thanksgiving, in 1621; it was the first meal eaten on the moon. Famously, Benjamin Franklin thought the turkey a better national bird than the eagle, and not just because he looked like a turkey, which I think he kind of did: a little plump, a wattle of a second chin. I have always agreed with Franklin’s assertion that we would have become a different kind of nation had we adopted for our symbol not a vicious bird of prey but the “vain & silly” turkey. If America had been charged only with living up to the example of the rather unimpressive turkey—a passive, peaceful bird—we may have ended up less imperialistic, less belligerent, more, well, like Canada. (Oddly, Canada doesn’t have a national bird, though its citizens are voting on one now: some of the nominations include the common loon, the gray jay, and, naturally, the Canada goose.)

Of course, my ruminations about a less-aggressive America inspired by a less-fierce national bird occurred before Lizzy and I were attacked by the turkeys. Though later I discovered that turkeys do embody a particularly American kind of comeback story. Since the early twentieth century, when wild turkeys had been reduced to a mere thirty thousand or so nationwide, they’ve had an amazing resurgence—one of the great modern ecological successes—and now some seven million individual birds do their thing (which includes roosting in trees and taking dust baths) in every state but Alaska. New York alone boasts some three hundred thousand. On Long Island, the seventy-five turkeys relocated to Suffolk County in the early nineteen-nineties are now three thousand and growing. I’d noticed this population bloom on the East End myself—the increasingly common sight of lines of turkeys crossing country roads, and taking their sweet time about it, too. (Originally, I assumed this was because the birds were none-too-smart, but now I see their leisurely gait, suspending traffic in either direction, as a more deliberate act of rebellion, as if the turkeys were a street-gang of youthful toughs, loitering just to prove a point: that they could.)

“Overpopulation is not a problem we hear a lot about,” said John Brasier of the National Wild Turkey Federation. “I think nature pretty much takes care of itself.” I asked him if he’d had any reports of turkeys attacking people. “You hear about that with geese, but I’ve never heard of nuisance turkeys.” Nevertheless, in 2011, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation issued a press release mentioning that the turkey “population has reached a level that, in some locations, nuisance permits have to be issued in order to control the amount of damage the birds are causing.” Aphrodite Montalvo, a citizen-participation specialist at the N.Y.D.E.C., laughed when I told her that my fiancé and I had been chased by turkeys (which I couldn’t blame her for), but went on to confirm via e-mail that the department does receive occasional calls about problem turkeys. Ever since the start of a turkey-hunting season on Long Island, though (which began in 2009, and harvests about a hundred birds annually), the complaints have dropped from around fifteen per year to around three.

The more research I did, however, the more it became clear that Lizzy and I were far from the only ones who’d been harassed by gobblers in recent years. From Staten Island to quiet New Jersey townships, from Minnesota suburbs to the Hamptons: evidence of turkey mischief, turkey aggression, turkey revenge. I found myself googling things like “turkey attacks” and “car accidents caused by turkeys,” and coming up with results like “Turkeygeddon: the Thirteen Best Turkey Attack Videos.” There were news stories about turkeys chasing TV reporters, bicyclists, mail trucks. There were tales of turkeys flying through windshields and causing multi-car pileups. Turkey journalism was rampant, funny as all hell, and often brilliant. I came across wonderful sentences: “A Springfield man pleaded innocent Tuesday to charges that he deliberately ran over a wild turkey in September on his way to anger management class.”

But in spite of my desire to dig up the dirt on these fowl, I could not ignore the other side of the story: the much more considerable evils done not by turkeys, but to them. Even the two turkeys pardoned each Thanksgiving by the President have to go through an unenviable selection process, which Obama described in 2010 as “strutting their stuff before a panel of judges with an eclectic mix of music playing in the background, kind of like a turkey version of ‘Dancing with the Stars’”—truly a fate worse than death, especially considering that the two birds spared in 2010 (Apple and Cider) died within the year anyway, having been bred for the dinner table and not for free-roaming the gardens at Mount Vernon. Monday brought the sad news that Peace, one of the two turkeys pardoned in 2011, passed away because of an illness. He’s survived by his companion, Liberty, but presumably not for long.

***

I spoke with Robin Donohue, a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who works at the Long Island National Wildlife Refuge Complex, to see if anyone else had had a similar encounter with the turkeys at Morton. “This is the first report we’ve had of any threatening behavior by the turkeys there,” he said, “or at any of the other Wildlife Refuges on Long Island.” At the same time, he didn’t seem fazed. “A lot of people go to Morton to feed the birds and turkeys, which is something we frown upon. When wild animals get accustomed to being around people, they lose their natural fear of them and that’s when problems happen. But I imagine they were just running up to you looking for food—I’ve never heard of turkeys being aggressive toward people.”

I informed him of the turkey-attack videos on the Web and said he should take a look, if not for his edification, then at least for his amusement. I told him, too, how I’d come across a bunch of information about aggressive turkeys on Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources Web site. Twenty-nine turkeys released in the state in the early nineteen-seventies had grown to over seventy thousand, and now some were causing problems. The Minnesota D.N.R. Web site talked about “highway” turkeys who were “dodging vehicles and blocking traffic”; it talked about how “habituated turkeys may attempt to dominate or attack people that the birds view as subordinates.” It talked about the importance of not feeding them, and of keeping wild animals wild. But my favorite thing it said, in bold letters, was: “Don’t let turkeys intimidate you.”

“People say it’s a bad idea to feed them,” explained Damian Wolfe, a resident of Sag Harbor, “but it certainly is fun.” Wolfe and his wife, Clare, took to feeding wild turkeys on their property about three years ago, and soon enough they were buying fifty-pound bags of corn to keep the birds well-stuffed. “This year, we have four different groups of turkeys, which include the Poults [a fiercely protective mother and her young] and the Fighting Fourteen. Then there’s Lonesome Joe, who’s always on his own, as well as Maureen, who’s also always solo—I don’t know if they don’t get along with the other turkeys, or if they just choose to be alone. Anyway, I come home at night from work and they’ll all run across the street to greet me. I think there are about twenty-four in total.” Wolfe said that the turkeys had never been aggressive toward him or Clare, though some will tap on the window to remind them it’s time to be fed. I asked him if he’d be eating turkey for Thanksgiving. “Oh, sure,” he said. “In fact, I would gladly eat some of these guys—there are a couple of annoying ones whose necks I’d love to wring—but I could never kill them, I just don’t have the heart for it. Besides, I heard the wild ones don’t taste very good.” “So what is it you love about turkeys?” I asked, truly curious. “Well, I love birds, and turkeys are birds, too—big, clumsy birds—but birds nonetheless. Besides, they’re such numbskulls, you know? How can you not love them?”

***

Determined to take a hike, Lizzy and I returned to Morton to give it another shot. Next to the parking lot, the same “innocent” bunny still sat there. For protection from the turkeys, I carried a long, thin bamboo stick I’d found in the back of my car, but when we rounded the bend, the big dinosaurian birds were nowhere to be seen. We walked on down the path deeper into the forest—a little pond here, open fields there, a sudden crash of deer through the brush. Chickadees followed us, flitting about from tree to tree along the trail, and when Lizzy turned and opened her palm to them, one came and landed right on it; finding nothing there, it chirped and flew off. The end of the path opened up into a beautiful, barren stretch of bay and beach, where piping plovers (the Hamptons’ resident celebrity endangered bird) have protected nesting grounds. We turned around and headed back. As we drew close to the entrance, Lizzy stopped short and grabbed my wrist—“Oh my God, there they are again,” she whispered, the beginning of panic in her voice—“I told you we shouldn’t have come back!” The turkeys were just off the path in a little open area, pecking at the ground in front of a few small cabins. We strode by them quickly, keeping our eyes on the ground, the way one might through a bad part of town. “Just keep walking,” she said, “and whatever you do, don’t look them in the eye.”